What makes a friend different from a lover? What makes a best friend different from a lover? I have come to terms that having a best friend is better than having several casual friends. A best friend who understands you is better than a lover who doesn't. Below is a poem that blurs the boundary between a friend and a lover.
Sexbuddy
I.
We have never loved each other.
I cannot say it more plainly than that.
The blunt tongue cuts the sharpest;
clarity: a drop of blood breaking in water.
We used sex to numb the small scalpel
of love outlining our joined bodies.
As I use words as an anaesthetic for truth.
"We have never loved each other."
II.
Now that you have found
him, the boy in whose eyes
you see your solitude twinned,
and thus erased, even your
language has been transformed:
"His pillow smells just like mine."
I see us as two understudies
hidden in the wings, the frottage
of velvet curtains, the weight
of skin made weightless
by the weight of caresses.
We rehearsed with each other
until it was time for one of us
to strut onto centrestage,
wipe warm-up pecks from our mouths and
deliver the true destiny of our lines.
Well, your turn came first. And
here I am, a surrogate, finally
displaced--or perhaps a hostage set free?
There is nothing to do now but to
watch you being held in arms more real
observe the wick of your tongue
burn under kisses primed by the ether
of our instructional passions.
Nothing to do but to silently finger
what you have left me with: blooming
under a collarbone, call it by its
real name: not a love-bite, but a bruise.
III.
What can two people
not in love
give each other
but the secret
to their own loneliness?
What can they say except:
"This is the source of my solitude.
This is where it leaks from
each night bathing me like a river
that irrigates this barren skin
river with no mouth not even a tongue
that is pulled by the gravity of memory
down to the ashen ocean of regret."
Touch it and watch it weep and shudder
like a wound or the eye of the captive
who is exhausted even of words to beg with
who has nothing left except his dumb animal love.
IV.
In the world of plants they call it tropism.
The curling of a vine towards light,
a root-hair inching closer to water.
My body leans towards yours too
and
I spill these metaphors--jewels
over your torso; like a seed-pod ripening
abruptly under the summer of your gaze.
"Your burnt-honey irises. Your rabbit warmth.
The cellophane of your lips. Blackcurrant breath.
Skin a film of cream. The salt pastilles
of your earlobes. Your ear a rose of cartilage."
How I groped towards you,
a clump of hair in my hands,
my cheek on your heart's apex.
We had no use for love,
our bodies confessed to each other
their most shameless needs,
surrendered their most intimate gratitude.
You were solid and that was enough.
Your absence is a metaphor
for the fact of your body.
V.
You hated my smoking.
You fanned the clouds away.
A few times you took my lighter
and refused to give it back.
But yet later on in the night
we would kiss, and somehow
you wouldn't mind what my
breath tasted like.
I think about this sometimes.
You could have said no.
I think about that time
you fell asleep after sex
and I spilled the dandruff
from the end of my cigarette
onto the broken eggshell
of your ankle.
VI
Here's some advice for
your new boyfriend and you--
When we say 'I love you'
what we have to be certain of
is not only our definition of 'love'
but often also our definition of 'I'.
What needs no clarification
if indeed you are in love
is the definition of you.
VII
I had no attachments to you
it is not abandonment that I feel
if my body is in a state of grief
it is just that of the infant
who believed the placenta
was its stillborn twin
You have been waiting for this
for so long, let me say it again:
so long. I did not share my loneliness
with you, only my body's loneliness
and yet the heart is part of this body
and the mind occupies a space less
than an urn's. What is etched in the flesh
cannot be translated not even if we created
the tissue alphabet. Now what I have
is the dawn of an empty star
the blanket frayed by fever
sleep which is life without remembering
my senses are prisms kept in the dark
now I have nobody to write
but myself I will have to begin work
on a script for an inner life
without need for love or violence.
Please sign my Guestbook, thank you.
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